[In the following review, attempts to place The God of Small Things within the tradition of modern Indian literature written in English.]

"India: The Fiction Issue" sang the cover of The New Yorker at the newsstand run by a Gujarati man inside Penn Station. On the bright cover, topped with turmeric sunset hues, sat a stone Lord Ganesha browsing through a couple of books, the task made easier because He has more than two hands. And emerging from a thicket, dressed for a safari, were a white couple, mouths agape.

This has been the season of the discovery of India—presumably because it is the fiftieth-anniversary year of Indian independence and not because India, under World Bank-I.M.F. dictates, has introduced wide-scale "structural adjustments," exponentially increasing the commercial traffic between India and the United States. (Jesse Helms, whose...